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Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean
- aaroninsf 2y agoIsn't one of the plots for some Jurassic Park sequel that velociraptors like, swam to other islands?
- Windchaser 2y agoHitched a ride on the boats, as I recall
- nnf 2y agoThinking about just how long the earth has been around fascinates me. I read (or listened to, rather) The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen, which was captivating. The audiobook is well-narrated too. We humans tend to think that the planet just "is" the way it is, but this is just how it exists in this moment in which we find ourselves observing it. The earth has worn many faces over the ages.
- ck2 2y agoWhat I want to see is the Theia collision rendered in realistic 3D (and if there was enough gas around for sound to carry, that too!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet) I guess this is close but not like the Hollywood blockbuster it should be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlhlCWplqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlhlCWplqk https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/collision-may-have-formed-the-moon-in-mere-hours-simulations-reveal/ https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/collision-may-have-formed-...
- dredmorbius 2y agoWatching the Nasa sim, and others I've seen multiple times before, thought occurs that by re-liquifying much of the Earth after its initial formation, heavier elements which had otherwise been trapped in the crust / upper mantle might have re-mobilised and sunk deeper into the core. I'm not sure of relative abundance of elements in the crusts of other rocky worlds, though at least generally Mars seems to have a greater prevalence of iron, and fewer of the lighter metals, in its own crust. See: <https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/a/20711 https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/a/20711> Citing: Arya Udry, Esteban Gazel, and Harry Y. McSween Jr., "Formation of Evolved Rocks at Gale Crater by Crystal Fractionation and Implications for Mars Crustal Composition", Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 123 (2018), Issue 6, pp. 1525-1540. <https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JE005602 https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JE005602> Harry Y. McSween Jr.1,G. Jeffrey Taylor, and Michael B. Wyatt, "Elemental Composition of the Martian Crust", Science 324 (2009), Issue 5928, pp. 736-739. <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5928/736 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5928/736> (The fact that we now have geological studies of multiple specific regions of Mars delights me.)
- lnxg33k1 2y agoI also am fascinated by it, have a look at this simulator, which show the face of earth at some given points https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/travel-through-deep-time-interactive-earth-180952886/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/travel-through...
- Electricniko 2y agoThere are also some cool animations out there that show the drifting, smashing, and more drifting of the plates. I like ones like these that provide some modern landmarks, or showing it in reverse, so you can track individual places through it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6bWbDl2ItM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6bWbDl2ItM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ng6YpxHxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ng6YpxHxU
- shagie 2y agoHow about... https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth/ https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35856820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35856820 405 points by ohjeez on May 8, 2023 | 73 comments :: original with comments by author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286770 )
- nine_k 2y agoEarth has been around for so long that it's exhausted most of the Sun's life-supporting resource. We have barely a billion years to figure out where to go next before Sun overheats earth beyond any habitability; more realistically, just a few hundred million years. No time to waste.
- lm28469 2y ago200 years of industrial revolution and we're well on the way out don't worry about what's coming in a billion years
- apetersson 2y agoBecause we're juuust about to become an interstellar species, right? Right?
- c-smile 2y agoWe MUST, having life on just one planet waiting for the next mass extinction event here is too optimistic.
- AlbertCory 2y agoWhy must we? There are other intelligent life forms in the Universe, undoubtedly. What makes us so special?
- exe34 2y agoWe're the only ones we've found so far. personally I'd say don't bother, but I'm a nihilist.
- AlbertCory 2y ago"don't bother" doing what? Looking for them? The chance of our ever encountering one in person is close to zero. We might find evidence that they're there, but that's about it.
- autokad 2y agoalso whats interesting is that 66 million years ago, the continents were mostly where they are now. 120 million years ago Africa was touching Brazil
- ggm 2y agoie the rate of movement is not a constant, speed of continental drift varies over time?
- autokad 2y agoyeah, they expand faster at first and slow down afterwards until something else happens. I was looking at the ocean floor and using smooth ocean floor as 'fast moving' and rough ocean floor as 'slow moving'. South America is moving 3 cm / year. using that with the ocean floors and some guestimation,,, between 120 and 113 m years ago SA moved about 12 cm / year and slowed down to 3 betwen 113 m years ago and now. Assuming no movement from Africa
- maxerickson 2y ago120 years ago, huge swaths of the US had been recently clear cut and didn't have a lot of forests on them. It doesn't even take ages for things to change. It's unfortunate that the public idea of conservation has become so associated with stasis.
- goatlover 2y agoThe idea of preserving pristine environments as they were needs to go. There are none, and environments are always changing.
- rexpop 2y agoBit of a straw man. The ecologists I know of are interested in cultivating biodiversity and preserving habitats from the corrosive influence of development, pollution, and climate change. "Pristine" isn't a term I've heard used much in this context. The language of "virgin" land belongs to the lexicon of settler colonialism, not environmentalism.
- defaultcompany 2y agoThe crazy thing to me is that the Earth has been around for one third of the time the universe has existed.
- dehugger 2y agoThe simulation was probably on fast forward mode until sentient life developed.
- bamboozled 2y agoBecause through all time and space, sentient life is the pinnacle of it all right? :)God's work.
- moneywoes 2y agodid animals fight wars?
- kstenerud 2y agoYes
- SenHeng 2y agoMay I introduce you to the Gombe Chimpanzee War? >The Gombe Chimpanzee War, also known as the Four-Year War,[3][4] was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in the Kigoma region of Tanzania between 1974 and 1978. The two groups were once unified in the Kasakela community. By 1974, researcher Jane Goodall noticed the community splintering.[5] Over a span of eight months, a large party of chimpanzees separated themselves into the southern area of Kasakela and were renamed the Kahama community. The separatists consisted of six adult males, three adult females and their young.[5] The Kasakela was left with eight adult males, twelve adult females and their young. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
- thangalin 2y ago> how it exists in this moment Follow the orange dot on each page of my book: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf
- nlehuen 2y agoThis video puts things into perspective, mapping the whole of 4.5B years of Earth history to 1 hour: https://youtu.be/S7TUe5w6RHo?si=9rkHNaXA2PXXMJjN https://youtu.be/S7TUe5w6RHo?si=9rkHNaXA2PXXMJjN
- throwawayk7h 2y agoIs this the same specimen?
- layer8 2y agoNo.
- patrickmay 2y agoI am sitting on my hands to resist the temptation to send this to my creationist aunt and uncle (who are otherwise great people).
- MisterTea 2y agoSimple rebuttle: the devil put those foot prints there to test their faith.
- andrewflnr 2y agoI've never heard this line from a real creationist, only ever as a strawman. Anyway, as far as I recall they don't (officially) have any problems with fossils like this. They'll just say the split happened during the Flood, like everything else.
- Windchaser 2y agoThe amount of energy it takes to split two continents and send them thousands of miles away from each other would be enough to boil off the oceans. Just think of the incredible amount of rock that has to be melted and resolidified (all of the rock in the rock floor between the two continents, or that was previously elsewhere). And resolidifying means releasing heat. Yeah, this simply can't happen in just hundreds of years.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoIf the initial premise is that an all powerful being created, well, everything. I am not sure that arguing the specifics of how manipulating continents is physically demanding is going to sway hearts and minds.
- andrewflnr 2y agoCreation scientists actually do go pretty far, though, in trying to make things as physically plausible as they can. I think they're aiming for a theory where God makes specific events happen, like creation itself, or unleashing water in the ground and air to generate the Flood, but aside from that physics pretty much runs as designed. And to their credit, this would be sort of a local minimum in divine interference required for the theory... if the rest of the physics worked. Ed: though I suppose that implies less than it ideally would about the attitudes of random believers on the street, who might well be a lot less principled about where they let divine interference into their model...
- tiahura 2y agoA little loose with “matching.”
- reaperducer 2y ago==, not ===.
- kjhughes 2y agoequal, not eq.
- runjake 2y agoAs far as I can tell, matching == the same species of dinosaurs, not the same exact dinosaur.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoIt was a Reallybigasaurus. ;) It's always interesting to watch programs about paleontology and cosmology, and see them tossing around "millions" and "billions," like "minutes" and "seconds." My mother[0] was a geologist, and our family vacations were often extremely educational. Every time we'd go through a roadcut on the highway, she would point out the layers, and tell me about the ages and whatnot. Today's XKCD sort of speaks to this[1]. [0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm [1] https://xkcd.com/2976/ https://xkcd.com/2976/
- wlesieutre 2y agoFor the rest of us, Roadside Geology books: https://mountain-press.com/collections/roadside-geology https://mountain-press.com/collections/roadside-geology
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoThose are very cool! I would have loved to have them. My mother probably would have approved.
- reaperducer 2y agoEvery time we'd go through a roadcut on the highway, she would point out the layers, and tell me about the ages and whatnot. One of the colleges I went to was in a mountainous area, and my geology class had weekly trips on Fridays to random road cuts around the region. We'd all pile out of the vans, and have to dig through the rocks and debris and write short reports about what we'd found, and present them the following Monday. Great class. Except if it rained on a Friday. That sucked.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- brailsafe 2y agoThe story's potentially neat and interesting, but for how many times it's been republished in mearly identical fashion across many mainstream outlets, there's doesn't seem to be a reference to a DOI or first-party source? I'm fine with having "matching" footprints have a different level of standard for geological time contexts, but give me something to read pls.
- drjasonharrison 2y agooriginal paper with source: https://smu.app.box.com/s/e2ghm8ycjb1zf6hu9pooypdl4sosylbn https://smu.app.box.com/s/e2ghm8ycjb1zf6hu9pooypdl4sosylbn I agree that online "click bait" science websites parrot the same content...google found the original paper though.
- brailsafe 2y agoty, I actually wasn't able to find it by searching
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoOf course the footprints look the same, the dinosaurs all used the same replicators to make their space boots before jet-packing over the proto-atlantic
- goatlover 2y agoWere the transporters malfunctioning that day?
- dredmorbius 2y agoIt was numerous examples of matching fossils, geological formations, and deformations which played a key role in validating the theory of plate tectonics (originally "continental drift"). Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science, details this in her book Plate Tectonics: An insider's history of the modern theory of the Earth (2001), which is one of the most powerful narratives of how a hypothesis can go from wild-eyed fringe to the absolute foundation of an entire scientific discipline, one whose own origins date to the earliest recorded history, in only 50 years. <https://archive.org/details/platetectonicsin0000unse https://archive.org/details/platetectonicsin0000unse> Kirkus review: <https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/naomi-oreskes/plate-tectonics/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/naomi-oreskes/pla...> And a shorter more recent article-length treatment from Oreskes: <https://www.nature.com/articles/501027a https://www.nature.com/articles/501027a> (2013) This focuses strongly on mid-Atlantic rift magnetic polarisation, which was key in confirming the drift theory, though it briefly mentions other evidence which helped prompt and support it earlier.
- julianeon 2y agoThere was an article recently about how it was the discovery of dinosaur bones that really began the shift away from organized religion. There had been theoretical arguments against religion before that made some headway - but this was a paradigm change. It was actually seeing dinosaur bones, and having to reconcile that with the idea of a 4,000 year old earth, that really changed hearts and minds. Suddenly the thought of being an atheist clicked with a lot more people. For the first time people credited the idea that Noah may have never had an ark. There was a distinct 'before' and 'after'. Note: I'd love to annotate this with a link but unfortunately the results on this topic have been SEO-poisoned.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> There was an article recently about how it was the discovery of dinosaur bones that really began the shift away from organized religion. The Greeks had already gone through that shift in classical times, with no knowledge of dinosaurs.
- begueradj 2y agoLife is a mystery. So much things to learn and discover that require unified efforts from all people around the world. Yet, we prefer to kill each others instead.